WATCH WATCH WATCH!!

that’s right they’re ALL here

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Sybil Ramkin is one of my heroines though

She spends forty-odd years fat and single and obsessed with dragons and loving it and letting nobody give her any shits

And then she meets a dashing-if-drunken forty-something watchman and they think they’re too old for love but they are so, so, so wrong and their relationship starts with mutual respect and trust and grows into an incredible amount of love and affection

But she’s a fat goddess the whole time and there’s never anything wrong with that because the woman is a city

#Because she’s a fat female character who has literally zero jokes about her diet #All the jokes are about her HUSBAND’s diet #She’s vast because she’s highly-bred and her size makes her powerful #Role models yo

There’s some line in some book, I think it’s The Fifth Elephant, about Sybil being a ‘big girl’ and how ‘big girls are taught to make themselves small so other people feel bigger’ WOW YES that is such a true thing though.

Oh my God The Fifth Elephant tho

“Among the other unwanted baggage that had been heaped on the young Sybil to hamper her progress through life was the injunction to be pleasant to people and say helpful things. People took this to mean that she didn’t think.”

and

“She was large and she was kind. She hadn’t enjoyed school much. A society of girls is not a good one in which to be large and kind, because people are inclined to interpret that as ‘stupid’ and, worse, ‘deaf’.”

Within pages of this she is bending iron bars over werewolves’ heads. I really wish she’d been able to have a go at Serafine, though, after the way the woman was talking about her at the beginning of the book, as if being friendly, even with people you don’t like, is some kind of weakness.

The Fifth Elephant is where Sybil really starts to flourish as a character, IMO. And the thing is, she’s far from stupid. She really pays attention to people in a manner possibly only surpassed by Carrot, which is how she memorizes whole dwarfish arias to deploy for maximum emotional impact and extensive notes on fat mining to haggle with the Low King. She notices people, and keeps up with them, and because of that she is able to mobilize the entire of the Sto Plains to watch a Goblin performance at a moment’s notice, changing the fate of an entire race. 

Sybil is large and she is kind and she can think. She is not stupid. She is not deaf. She takes such an interest in you and everything that’s happening in your life and you are damn lucky that she is kind. 

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Well, it’s finally finished.  It was a genuinely satisfying project. I present you Ankh Morpork in the guise of Google Maps.

<makes highly undignified squeeing noises>

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im reading discworld and im on the third book and i only just realized they arent arranged like this

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Yet more unreasonable employment standards in the UK

blatant alivism and it’s disgusting.

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vimes in his natural habitat

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I don't know how to articulate this well, but I really fucking hate the way a lot of thin writers write fat characters. Like how men write women "breasting boobily" there is something so dehumanizing about how fat characters are often written. "He waddled", "he lumbered", the writer of the book I'm reading always mentions this characters "fleshy hand" when he does something with his hand. Like, we already know that he's fat. There is no need to describe everything he does as "doing it fatly".

*fishes this absolute treasure from the tags*

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New cosmology dropped, we know what's underneath the turtle now!

@gallus-rising

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Turns out you can roll a 7 on a d6

but only once.

One of your players is clearly Cohen the Barbarian.

@discworld-heritage-posts

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Happy International Sir Terry Pratchett Day! Quote from (x) Art by Paul Kidby

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It’s not a Discworld joke unless you read it, don’t parse it as a joke, and then carry on with your life for ten years until someone stops you to say something like “It’s a pavlovian response because the dog ate a pavlova” and you scream Terry’s name with enough indignant rage you hope it rattles the pillars of the multiverse so wherever his soul is he’ll hear it.

#i don’t think this is what pterry meant by ‘a man’s not dead while his name is still spoken’

I absolutely think it is

I read Jingo for the first time when I was 13.

I’m 33 now, and I still discover a new joke every time I reread it.

Terry was a comedic genius

#shoutout to the one in Soul Music about the leopard that got thrown out of the circus because it couldn't hear the ringmaster#it was several months after my second or third time reading the book that I clocked it was a Deaf Leopard (via @morkaischosen)

god DAMMIT

When I was informed that “Vetinari” is a pun on “Medici”. That pun was so painful I couldn’t even see it.

...are you FUCKING KIDDING ME.

*starts thunderously knocking on the doors of heaven*

get out here Terry I just wanna talk

Twurp’s Peerage made me throw a book (gently) at a wall.

In the UK, the book of the peerage is called Burke’s Peerage. Burke sounds like berk, which means a silly/annoying person. So Terry took ‘twerp’, another word for a silly or annoying person, and replaced the e with u. 

The Book of Silly and Annoying People, based on the real thing with a pun on the name thrown in for good measure.

OMG I FUCKING *KNEW* VETINARI WAS A JOKE ON FUCKONG SOMETHING I JUST COULDNT GRASP IT. I THOUGHT IT WAS A REFERENCE TO WIND SOMEHOW

I am not a talented punster so I was today old when I realised about Vetinari.

guys it's fucking close to water

Latinclass ca. 9th grade: the text we had to translate contained the words trans means "on the other side of" or in german it can be translated to "über/ hinüber". Also silvas; silvanis means "the forest" or in german "der Wald".

Trans silvas very simply translated into german would be über den Wald

Trans silvas -> Transsilvanien -> Überwald

My latin teacher gave me a very weird look as I suddenly facepalmed myself and groaned quietly.

The Venturi and Selachii feud is what killed me when I got it.

The Venturi Effect is a scientific term referring to the acceleration of a liquid through a narrow tube (like a jet).

Selachii is a classification of sharks. (I discovered this when my stepson got really into sharks)

... fucking HELL Terry.

In Carpe Jugulum, Count Magpyr boasts of having helped write the Malleus Maleficarum, along with the Torquus Simiae Maleficarum, the Auriga Clavium Maleficarum, and in fact the entire Arca Instrumentorum.

The Malleus Maleficarum is a very real, very nasty and absolutely batshit insane book from late 15th-century Germany, basically laying out the procedure for catching, torturing, and executing witches. Its title translates to The Hammer of Witches. The other titles are Pratchett's inventions.

Malleus = "hammer" Torquus Simiae = "monkey wrench" Auriga Clavium = "bucket of nails" Arca Instrumentorum = "box of tools"

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The carrier of carriers. A tribute to Terry Pratchett

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Suddenly got hit with the concept plus a very detailed visual of Moist von Lipwig donning his famous Postmaster General suit via magical girl transformation. And now I am supposed to go about my day? As if I hadn't just experienced what I can only describe as a divine vision??

Good news, our deliverance is at hand!

(Deliverance, gettit? Hilarious, I know)

I also posted all of these in response to an ask here, but this version has some edits made to it so is by all accounts superior

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Describing Terry Pratchett’s books is difficult. Someone asked me what the book I was reading was about, and I had to tell them it was about banking and the gold standard, but like in a cool way with golems and action. 

 I don’t think they believed me.

welcome to the club

It is so, so difficult to explain to people that your favorite book is about transgender feminist dwarves, Nazi werewolves, and the mystery of a missing piece of really old ritual bread. And Opera saves the day.

yes, give us those sweet, sweet, terrible descriptions

A tortoise who’s really a god, finds an allegory for Jesus and they go on adventures in an ancient greece like place and then a desert 

The chief of police averts a rerun of an ancient war, partially despite and partially because of being possessed by a dying dwarf’s graffiti

It’s like Les Miserables but Javert is the good guy and also there’s time travel.  

Macbeth but it’s about the witches

Chapter one, the protagonist is hanged. Then he’s put in charge of the post office. Yes, in that order.

it’s like mulan if there were way more mulans in mulan and also pratchett is extra irritated that too many people missed the point of jingo

The bureaucrats of the universe get annoyed at the paperwork humanity causes so they decide to steal Christmas.  Replacement Christmas is done by Death and replacement Death is done by goth Mary Poppins, who is also in charge of the investigation.

these are all nice and accurate reasons to read discworld if you haven’t yet

Romeo and Juliet football AU but the other team is wizards

Hollywood????

An entire clan of tattooed, hairy, kleptomaniac, alcoholic Scotsmen decide a little girl is their new best friend whether she wants to be or not and she rescues her absolutely worthless brother by discovering the power of selfishness.

@cosmictwobyfour

Someone is dying, journalism is being invented, and part of Pulp Fiction is going on in the background.

The universes burocrats want to measure everything so they pay a man to imprison time so everything will stop and they can measure things in peace. Goth mary Poppins saves the day, the fifth horseman of the apocalypse is the best Milkman in the world, and chocolate saves the day. Also someone was born twice.

Classic dynastic machinations are happening in fantasy China, to be completely overturned by a gang of elderly barbarian heroes and the world’s worst wizard and best sprinter

Death incarnate battles a shopping cart for the fate of the world.  

@grifalinas

Phantom of the Opera au, except there’s witches, a cookbook that is thinly-veiled pornography, and Christine is played by a fledgeling witch with multiple personalities who can’t stop being sensible long enough to enjoy herself

Hidden heir to the throne decides an cynical, alcoholic cop is the best role model in the world.

Atlantis provides an excuse for a xenophobia-inspired war between Britain and the Middle East but it’s fine because the armies are arrested for conspiracy to cause public nuisance.

the jfk assassination is parodied in the above.

Rain is brought to australia by a lousy wizzard who runs from dropbears, steals a sheep, and invents vegamite

(sigh)(smile) All of the above.

You can defeat Vampire Fascism with the powers of violence, your debilitating anxiety disorder, and a nice cup of tea

the pied piper is a racket being run by some talking mice and a cat but they accidentally invent socialism. then of course there are also the rat horrors

A trio of witches (two of them uninvited) go on a journey to find out how the third one should be a fairy godmother. They run into and out of half-finished stories and manage to encounter a large amount of classic literature unscathed.

a cop time travels and has a hard boiled egg

The hanged conman in charge of the Post is now in charge of the Bank and the Mint, who are technically owned by an incontinent dog now. Stamps lead to the invention of banknotes and now there’s golems everywhere, which is a problem and a solution in itself.

The guy who made one of Replacement Death’s forms and experimented in steam power Died and his son created the first train, who is also a god and provides many of the autistic people of Fantasy New York/London a brand new hyperfixation, including the secretary of the most powerful man in Fantasy New York/London. Also the guy that should have been hanged (and is now in charge of the mint/post) is back helping the goblins make a revolution and work for his wife and train company. he takes goblin drugs at least twice and fights on top of a train with the alcoholic cop. dwarf bigots are mad about there being two genders.

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For all the many flaws of the tagging system on this hellsite, it is so perfect for Sending Home. A man's not dead while his name is still spoken, and what are the tags but the Overhead of tumblr? They aren't the posts themselves, but they are metacommentary on posts, notes to friends, info to be passed on. The message has been logged and is continuing to be sent on. GNU

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